Good

He retired from work. He moved out of his old house and bought a new home. It wasn’t a nice place, but it was in a decent neighborhood. And the house had a detached garage apartment.

May 4, 2018

I’ll call him Sam, but he was more than just a Sam. He was special is what he was. On his outside, he was a fella with gray hair, a drywall man, a widower.

On the inside, he was a giant.

Long ago, his wife died from cancer. He thought his life was over. He gave up day-to-day living and stayed in his bathrobe for months. He ate cartons of ice cream, he quit doing laundry, stopped shaving.

He retired from work. He moved out of his old house and bought a new home. It wasn’t a nice place, but it was in a decent neighborhood. And the house had a detached garage apartment.

That’s where it all happened.

The first person to live in the apartment was a young man he’d met at a diner. The kid was a waiter. He was covered in tattoos and piercings. They started talking.

As it happened, the kid was late on child support, behind on taxes, and homeless. It broke Sam’s heart.

So he let the kid live in the apartment, rent free. After only a year, the kid had saved up enough money to make child support, and get onto his feet.

The second person to live in Sam’s garage apartment was a young woman with three girls. Her husband was injured in a work accident—it crushed his ribs and spine.

Sam let the woman live in the apartment while she visited her husband’s rehab every day. Sam even babysat her girls. When her husband got released, the family lived in that one-bedroom place for two years.

The third person to live in the apartment was an elderly man who was legally blind. He’d lost eighty percent of his vision and couldn’t live on his own.

Sam opened his door.

On the day the man moved in, Sam gave him a walkie talkie. “Use this to call me,” Sam said. “Any time of the day or night.”

The radio got used a lot. Right up until the day the old tenant finally passed.

And I’m only getting warmed up.

A nineteen-year-old boy once lived in that garage apartment. The kid had been released from a detention center. He had no family, no friends.

Sam helped the kid. He called in favors and got the kid a job with a landscaping crew. He didn’t stop there. He threw birthday parties for the young man, Super Bowl parties, poker nights, movie nights, trips to the beach, and cookouts. He treated the kid like family.

Today that kid owns his own company and has his own family.

Sam’s garage apartment was also home to a woman and her son—a boy with autism. The single mother had been living in a bad neighborhood, her life was an uphill battle. Sam gave her a free place to stay and helped her with bills.

He bought her groceries, he babysat her son when she was at work. He taught the boy to play football. He taught the child to swim.

But these are just some of the highlights of that little one-bedroom apartment owned by the simple gray-haired man. If the sheetrock in that place could only speak, I’ll bet it would tell all sorts of stories about the people who lived there.

I understand there are many of these sorts of stories.

But if you ask me, the real story isn’t about single mothers, wayward souls, or blind old men with two-way radios. It’s about a gray-haired somebody who had an extra room. About a man who never made the newspaper, who never won any awards, a man who didn’t want his name used.

A man who once thought his life was over after his best girl died from cancer.

“To us he was ‘Dad,’” said Sam’s daughter. “But to a lot of people he was kind of an angel, you know?”

That gray haired old man could have been my grandfather. I lived with my grandparents in a huge old antebellum house with a garage apartment out back. He rented that apartment to a lesbian couple because, in the 50’s, no one else would rent to them. Then, he rented it to a series of people down on their luck until they could get back on their feet. He became disabled long before I was born but that didn’t stop him from doing good deeds, like taking care of an unwanted grandchild or renting to people who would otherwise not have a roof over their heads. Good men and women exist just like the 4 leaf clovers in our backyard. You just have to look for them to find them among all the other less special ones.

Oh wow what a beautiful soul this man was. He had something called compassion and if the world only had half of what he had can you imagine how the world would be today and especially tomorrow?
There is a lot of great souls in our world but we need more Sam’s.
Thanks for helping me believe that the planet is just a little bit brighter and a little bit more kind.
I know Sam is using his wings to make a difference even in Heaven. Hugs, Beth

Reminds me of my husband. We owned a duplex and Richard only charged what he thought the single parents with children could afford. When the mother (and there was a single father as well) was able to get on her feet after a few years, he would ask her to let another person in need give him a call. At a memorial service for one of these single parents, many of the former tenants got up to speak about how blessed they were to have been led to Mr Schweck. He was so surprised at how he had touched their lives and their children. Not once did he ever share this with his family, he just knew it was the right thing to do.

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Sean Dietrich

Sean Dietrich is a columnist, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His work has appeared in Southern Living, The Tallahassee Democrat, Good Grit, South Magazine, Alabama Living, the Birmingham News, Thom Magazine, The Mobile Press Register, and he has authored seven books.